Restaurants and other prepared-food providers use a variety of means to create, build and manage their business. These means include: means for building customer awareness of their service; means for attracting customers to their service; means for encouraging customers to continue using their service; means for procuring and utilizing land, equipment, food materials, supplies, labor and capital to provide their service; and, means for managing and coordinating the above means.
Since the beginning of commercial transactions, restaurants and prepared-food providers have accomplished these tasks with mixed results. As technological and societal advances took place, the industry co-opted these advances. Stone and wood-cutting tools resulted in restaurant signs. The invention of writing devices brought menu boards. The printing press brought printed menus and order pads. Mass publications like magazines and newspapers brought advertising. The automobile, along with the interstate highway system resulted in billboard advertising, fast food restaurants, drive-through windows, delivery service and large restaurant chains under the same name and ownership. The advent of computers brought electronic demand planning, staff scheduling, supplier ordering and accounting and business management applications.
Each of these advances changed the demand for restaurant and other prepared-food services, the way in which consumers used these services and the manner in which these services were provided. With each new advance, the industry grew and diversified, meeting the unique needs of more and more consumers, more frequently. However, these advances also brought greater complexity to the process of providing restaurant and other prepared-food services. Further, these advances failed to address some of the problems plaguing the industry since its inception.
Despite it's service diversification, participants in the restaurant and other prepared-food services industries have not invented a system capable of flexibly managing their ability to provide service through any or all of their variety of service delivery mechanisms (e.g., dine in service, carry-out service, delivery service, catering service, consumer self-service, machine service, etc.,) with the demand for these services.
Furthermore, since they have never taken the step just above mentioned, they also have never been able to flexibly match the demand for these services and service delivery mechanisms with their ability to provide these services.